Jose Espinoza
Born: 1968 | Years incarcerated: 26 | Released: 2018 | Location: Stockton
The first time Jose Espinoza got arrested, his father told the police: “No, keep him there. I want him to learn a lesson.”
Juvenile hall counselors began to know him as a regular. “This is going to be your home for the rest of your life,” Jose recalls them saying to him. “And I believed that.” Behind the prison gates “was the only place I felt safe. I didn’t have to worry about my father hitting me in there.”
One night, on the streets of his hometown of Stockton, Jose was selling drugs when he was approached by a man from a different neighborhood. “How is this guy going to come into my neighborhood … knowing that this is our neighborhood?” He pulled out a gun and shot the man in cold blood.
He was convicted and sentenced to 19 years to life. At the time, he thought the sentence was unjust, but he thought differently years later. “I have a second chance,” he said. “My victim never did, and I understand that today.”
Jose remained an active gang member in prison. But in 2009, a birthday visit from his daughter changed his mindset forever. She told him: “I wish that when I blew out the candles and opened my eyes it was you on the other side of that cake.”
He cracked.
“My heart don’t beat just for me, my heart beats for someone else. And that someone else wants to see me come home.” He began attending Alcoholics Anonymous classes, self-help groups and restorative justice circles. “I didn’t really become a man till I went to prison.”
At the time of his crime, he was 24. With the combination of his rehabilitative efforts, time served and under a new youth offender law, Jose became eligible for parole. In 2018, he walked out the gates of Corcoran State Prison to find his daughter waiting for him.
He lived at a transitional home before staying with family members for a short period, eventually moving in with his fiancee, Sabrina Flores.
He took up a few odd jobs for income, but the gigs didn’t last. He had multiple battles with pneumonia, suffered from cirrhosis of the liver and developed blood clots in his legs. In the fall of 2020, Jose contracted COVID-19 and battled it for months. In April 2021, Sabrina found him on the bathroom floor, dead.
“He didn’t think he was coming home” from prison, says Sabrina, who had known Jose since they were teens. “He was doing whatever he wanted in there. When he got out, his body reacted differently.”
She says his final request was to be buried with his father. That request has now been fulfilled.